Library Day In The Life, Days 2 & 3

Back to work after three excellent days in southern California. That first day back after trips are always the hardest — especially after arriving home at midnight (in bed closer to 1:30) and having an 8:30 am meeting.

The morning was a bit rough trying to figure out what I missed on the day off. Weeded through the email for the important items. Went through the ticketing system to find any quick wins. Took care of a few items before the weekly UX touchbase meeting. The afternoon was more of the same — quick tickets, a meeting for search and product discovery on the site (yes — information architecture and taxonomy are integral to that process!), followed by a company leadership monthly meeting. I can’t tell you what went on in that meeting because it’s James Bond-like — if I told you, one of us would have to perish in some odd turn of events. Ok, not really, but it’s still confidential information.

Picked up Triumph of the City from the Zappos library to read this week. Ended up making it through 3 pages before falling asleep. Did I mention how tired I was?

Wednesday started out about the same, but a 9:30 meeting. The meeting went well, especially considering I’m trying to normalize the taxonomy so that no items are duplicated (one home — and only one home — for items). Worked out a work flow for this team which will help everyone out in the future, so a win first thing in the morning. Followed that up with a quick quality assurance test on a new feature for our in-house taxonomy tool. Found an error, and worked with the fab developer to get it fixed so that it might be released tomorrow.

After lunch, it was time for the weekly data sync, where the UX team, customer service people, analysts, and project & product managers get together to put everyone on the same page. I really like those meeting since there’s a lot of good information exchanged. The three o’clock crash then happened, where I felt like I needed a 2 hour nap. Acquired an Odwalla bar and some green tea to pick up my energy again, and pushed through another few tickets before the end of the day. Tickets ranged from taxonomy additions to search items that needed to be cleaned up or redirected to a taxonomy based search rather than a raw text search. That’s always an interesting vetting process since it’s a bit balance between search (the broad gathering of products) compared to taxonomy (the narrowed gathering of products), especially since you never want to assume what your user is thinking or for what they’re searching. They’re annoying little fights at time, but they’re what keep the job exciting day after day.

Oh, yes… and over the past two days we set up a new fish tank. The old one decided that it would be fun to short out on Friday. Smoke and everything. Glad it didn’t fry the lone tetra in the tank! But now fishy has a clean new home, and seems quite happy in his new digs.

Photo: Back To Work… by Richard Holster and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.